AT&T is incorporating Oracle Network Cloud Service-FastConnect to the AT&T NetBond for Cloud ecosystem, giving business customers another cloud service migration option. Business customers will be able to manage and access their Oracle Cloud services using NetBond for Cloud’s secure and dedicated connectivity.

“This will be delivered through Oracle’s FastConnect product, which we have integrated into so it gives customers on AT&T’s VPN network through NetBond access to the Oracle cloud,” said Andy Daudelin, VP of cloud and cloud networking for AT&T, in an interview with FierceTelecom. “We already have some customers lined up through pre-selling and what we found was the standard NetBond value prop applies here: performance, added security and ease of management.”

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Daudelin said that the Oracle partnership will find the greatest utility with large enterprise customers.

“What we’re also finding is the Oracle customer set really is a sweet spot because they typically have enterprises dealing with a lot of data in their databases so performance becomes paramount and security will be key requirements,” Daudelin said. “The value propositions we have really speaks to their customer set.”

Oracle is part of a growing base of cloud partners AT&T has made for NetBond. The partnership provides not only a secure connection for Oracle’s large business customers, but also gives AT&T’s customers another direct connection into a major cloud provider.

The AT&T NetBond for Cloud ecosystem consists of 20 members delivering secure access to more than 25 major cloud services.

Focus on private networking

An important element of the NetBond service for business customers is that they can carry their service on AT&T’s private network. This means that AT&T can provide a more predictable network experience that is free from the latency issues of the public internet. AT&T NetBond for Cloud enables businesses to connect, or "bond," their AT&T VPN to whatever cloud provider a customer chooses.

“The key value is it basically extends a business customer’s private network into the Oracle cloud in a way that is 100% off internet and that means better performance and improved security,” Daudelin said.

Pay for what you use

Since no two businesses are in the same situation, the NetBond system allows customers to effectively crank up bandwidth as needed for various lengths of time. A business customer could effectively scale up to 5 Gbps if it was doing a major system backup in the cloud, for example, and only pay for the bandwidth they need for that particular time. Such a proposition is important, particularly for those business customers that are considering or are in the process of migrating to the cloud.

“Because of the elasticity of the bandwidth, it can burst up or down with the usage,” Daudelin said. “That is ideal for customers that are migrating to the cloud from a dedicated environment or customers that live in both worlds and have a large amount of data in their private environment and some in the cloud.”

Daudelin added that the burstable bandwidth capabilities will help businesses cost-effectively navigate through their multi-year cloud transitions.

“The ability to burst makes easier to transition and manage a migration moving to the cloud,” Daudelin said. “As we know, the migration to the cloud is not a one week effort or a one-year effort and is sometimes a journey over several years and you live in a hybrid cloud environment.”

Up until now, business customers transitioning to the cloud had a few connectivity options: use the existing internet, purchase private bandwidth connections. However, these options have various issues. Putting cloud data over an internet connection creates not only security but also latency issues. Purchasing private network connections, while an option, also poses other challenges.

Customers can provision bandwidth on what they need and what’s most affordable, but that means they won’t have enough bandwidth to burst during heavy periods of migrating. The other scenario is a business can provision to the peak amount of data to the cloud. As a result, a business pays a lot more for bandwidth they won’t use. But AT&T’s bursting capability on NetBond can allow a business to burst up to 5 Gbps.

“Business customers can have their network charges based on 95th percentile of their peak load so they’re able to do bursting without a cost implication,” Daudelin said. “That is a cost advantage, but also makes it easier to manage.”